


The Devil Divine

by meltokio



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-09
Updated: 2017-05-09
Packaged: 2018-10-30 00:37:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 4,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10865409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meltokio/pseuds/meltokio
Summary: An assortment of drabbles and prompts set in an alternate universe where Fiona, hired by the Crimson Raiders, infiltrates Helios. Also from an old RP blog.





	1. Promotion

She’s been on edge for a week straight. A bout of insomnia fuels a caffeine dependency. Her hands shake when they’re not occupied, jaw clenches when she’s not aware. She’s got a desk in plain sight, far away from her pitiful cubicle several floors below. She aches for the obscurity of her old position, even if this one affords her even more access to sensitive information.

She has to see him every day, several times a day. She’s grown to expect the winks, the smarmy comments, the rapid and unpredictable mood swings. She adjusts for them, makes herself scarce when she needs to, turns on the eager pleaser out of necessity. Fiona knows she will adapt to her new visibility. Despite everything she’s self-assured. She’s orchestrated inopportune daydreams, purposefully torn stockings, dropped pens: small incompetencies. Nothing that would get her spaced, just enough to make her appear guileless. She was either promoted for eye candy or for monitoring. She must be prepared for either scenario.

Livia Strauss may be naive, but Fiona is not. The hands on her shoulders are inevitable, no doubt suggesting a peek down her blouse. One palm brushes against her windpipe as fingers curl around her neck. She swallows against dry warmth, notes only the hint of pressure. The ghost of a threat, enough to turn her pulse to war drums. His free hand cups her chin, turns her head to face his mismatched glare.

There’s a brief moment of vicious veracity gone in the space of a blink. Honesty in one heartbeat and deception in the other. Some sick part of her hopes he sees the savagery of her uncultured upbringing, the raw anger beneath the manicured facade. It’s daring and stupid to let the mask slip for even one second, but she has always been a bit of both.

The next moment her lips are bruising against prosthetic skin, sharp and sudden enough to make her gasp. His grip tightens a fraction and elicits something obscene and carnal. She bites down on his bottom lip hard enough to leave a mark: allure and attack. It’s worthwhile to note that in this case her natural instinct favors fight over flight.

Daring. Stupid. A pattern emerges.

He wipes her lipstick stains off with the back of his hand. When he makes his grand exit she’s still alive.


	2. Staff Appreciation

She’s so painfully unaccustomed to the opulence of Helios. Food is plentiful and relatively nutritious, she can get a full night’s sleep without a gun beneath her pillow, and she’s learned the ways and wonders of coffee in all its many and myriad forms. People have closets full of outfits, champagne for celebrating, sushi for lunch, fresh parasite-free water that comes straight from the tap. It’d be heaven if the threat of discovery weren’t ever-present.

She’s playing with fire, entertaining this weird working pseudo-friendship with Handsome Jack. He hasn’t spaced her yet, but every twitch of his synthetic face sets her teeth to clenching. Every office summons sparks a new round of lethal scenarios. One time he’d pinged her while she was speaking to Sasha back home and she’d had to breathe into a paper bag for five minutes.

Despite the fear she acts as if she hasn’t a care in the world, bantering and joking with the guy who has systematically waged war on her planet for years. She assumes he likes keeping her around to balance out the scores of ass-kissers throughout the rest of the station. Or maybe he’s caught on to her game, keeping her close to monitor her access. Either way, he’s called her up to _‘do lunch’_ in his office, a spread that makes her stomach ache just to look at it. She nibbles at whatever he shoves at her, bemoans the _‘garbage’_ she ate during her fictional college years. When she’s finished and the service ‘bots take everything away she pushes herself out of the chair adjacent, saunters over to his side (a long-ass trip considering how big the damn desk is) and, propping herself up on the arm of his giant recliner, presses a kiss against the peak of his cheekbone and leaves a lip-shaped smudge of red on the plastic skin.

"Thanks for the food, Boss."


	3. For Luck

He’s propped up against the fast-travel kiosk in his office, languid and lax with one hand in his pocket. Prepped and armed for a visit to Pandora ( _‘Personal business. Hold all my calls.’_ ) She’s got a datapad in one hand and her hip in the other, chewing the inside of her cheek. She gets homesick sometimes, staring out at her planet in its bed of stars. Maybe not for the place itself but for the people in it. She could always ask Jack to take her with him; he’d probably say yes. He hasn’t refused her anything yet. He’d likely treat it like a holiday; take a company car and drive by her old childhood haunts with one hand on the wheel and the other on her knee. The thought disturbs her, makes her jaw lock up in protest. Her rust-colored chapters, hunger pangs and knife-fights, cannot mix with her sterling silver conference calls and champagne bubble baths. Like oil and water.

And for someone who was sent to Helios to collect information, there are just some things she doesn’t want to know. She’s always been a criminal but never a career killer. Not like him.

So she bites her tongue, breathes a dramatic sigh at his cheeky request, made with a smug grin, mismatched eyes devilish beneath the mask. She turns off the comm in her ear as if someone might listen in (and she’d never put it past anyone in her department) and motions for him to lean down to her height.

She kisses him, chaste and brief, lips pressed against the pseudo-skin until she pulls away before either of them get greedy. Her lipstick stains the synthetic material, stark against the paler shade. and, as every time before, she wipes the evidence away with her thumb.

"Just once," she murmurs in her liar’s language. "for luck."


	4. All Nighter

She’s up a full hour before him, partly from jet-lag (space-lag? Her circadian rhythm is still firmly wired to Pandoran time despite the artificial cycles on the station) and partly from nerves. Even afforded this temporary alliance, she’s still constantly on edge. Fiona hasn’t slept more than four hours a night in a month. Sometimes her hands shake when she reaches for her breakfast tray in the morning.

Jack’s digs are much more spacious than her own tiny, standard employee dormitory. He even has a couch. And the view is something she’ll never get used to: Pandora resplendent, sending purple and grey shadows arcing across floor and furniture. She pads on bare feet across the tile to the kitchen, flicks on the automatic coffee maker and cracks a couple of eggs into a pan. He’s got a row in his closet dedicated pressed skirts and blazers (thoughtful in a way that says he’s prepared for ‘overnight guests’, so maybe just lewd-but-practical). She finds a spare toothbrush in the (enormous) bathroom, touches up day-old makeup in the most flattering mirror she’s ever looked into. By the time the coffee machine chimes she’s dressed and put-together … and he’s still out cold, one arm flung over his eyes.

She sits on his side of the bed, rolls on a fresh pair of stockings as he groans in protest. Fiona gives him a minute to whine before bracing herself on her elbows to interrupt sleepy complaints with her mouth. She laughs in her throat at a sudden change of attitude. Apparently a kiss and a peek of cleavage is all it takes to make him a morning person.

Fiona weaves out of his grasp to slip on her heels before tossing a quip behind her.

"Get up, lazy. You have a meeting with the shareholders in an hour."


	5. Ignition

It’s getting hard to keep lying to herself, assuring her own morality that she doesn’t enjoy this. Harder still when this time she’s the incendiary: perched on the corner of his desk, hosed legs crossed and dangling from her inched-up skirt as smoke curls from a lit cigarette between pouted lips. Silhouetted against the cosmic vista she looks like a loaded pistol, mouth rouged and ready to spit bullets.

There’s an unspoken agreement between them, written in ink — written in blood. She dances at the edge of open aggression, lifts her leg as he approaches to plant one sharp heel beneath his ribs, presses enough to watch the cloth of his shirt gather around the stiletto point. Every single time they meet like this she wonders if she couldn’t just end it all before it starts. How easy would it be to just snuff him out while he’s vulnerable?

How sorry would she be if she failed?

She takes one last drag before she flicks her cigarette onto the floor. In the space between tobacco hitting tile and nicotine hitting lungs, her stockings are torn at the inseam, legs parted to wrap around slender hips. They shed layers like scales but her heels stay on, carving red tracks across the valley of his lower back as they spur him deeper, harder until a desk lamp falls to shatter on the floor.

"Don’t stop."

Behind the glass lay Elpis, bloody as a battlefield. Hollowed out and sucked dry with parasites crawling over her skin. He sinks his teeth into her neck, slips two fingers past pomegranate lips to rest on her tongue. She tastes copper and iron in her mouth, hears a sub-machine heartbeat between her eardrums.

She closes her eyes to the carnage but still sees stars.


	6. Cherry

For once in her life, she knows excess.

The good food. The liquor. The cigarettes. The clothes that cost more than she’s ever seen in her lifetime. The luxury. Bed sheets with thread counts so high that she can slip right off the side of his ultra-California king if she’s not careful. The Jacuzzi baths in veined marble. Opulence bought with blood money. She doesn’t have to drink to get drunk anymore. This life is intoxicating enough.

And on top of it all the stolen kisses, a hand on her chin or her neck or her ass or in her hair. She learns fast that he’s insatiable, tastes her open-mouthed like a man starved. Claims and colonizes her like he does to her planet. But just like Pandora, she rebels. Plants insidious seeds, observes and learns his preferences to exploit later. Every wince, every groan and growl against her throat is a little victory. Slowly, subtly she feels the scale tip in the right direction.

One late afternoon she brings a collated report of expenditures, organized and edited (she had to bribe one of the nerds down in coding to show her how to work the spreadsheet, then send a copy to the Raiders on a private channel) to specifications, and drops it with a slap on his desk. To his credit he looks impressed, flips through the packet as she seats herself on the arm of his chair (the goddamn dopamine injectors kicking in to smooth out her natural edges).

If a disinterested half-grin is of any indication, her sorry excuse for “contributing” is bought and paid for. Satisfied with a job sort-of-done, she moves to stand before rough hands are at her hips, pulling her into his lap and running down the sides of her thighs, curling into her blazer to shrug it off, and (predictably) finding their way to her chest.

She’s grateful he can’t see her roll her eyes.

She shifts in her seat with a purposeful swivel, looks him in the eye with that dangerous, savage gaze she wears when caught off guard. She pulls one hand off her breast, guides it from her decolletage to her throat, favors him a plucked-cherry grin before curling her lips around two fingers.

Watching that smug smirk drip from his face gets her off more than anything.

She lavishes sensitive flesh between his fingers with her tongue, rakes her teeth against each knuckle when she takes them out again. Her haughty look of obscene triumph shatters when he slides them between her legs.


	7. Kill of the Night

She really ought to thank her lucky stars that she beat Jack back to the office.

If she hadn’t, he’d be standing on the receiving end of a slew of ( entirely correct ) aspersions. Some revved-up desk jockey with the idea that maybe if he exposes the snake in the proverbial grass he’ll get a promotion. Or a raise. Or a pat on the head. A man so thoroughly indoctrinated by the dogma of Hyperion that he’s willing to break into Handsome Jack’s private office just to sing the gospel.

But he made one vital error, one he will not live long enough to regret: some snakes are venomous.

Fiona isn’t often spurred to violence, only taking that measure when her life is threatened. At the crossroads between victory or defeat, there is a simple choice hanging like the sword of Damocles above both their heads. Only one of them will walk away from this. And it sure as _hell_  ain’t gonna be him.

She plays the vanquished until his guard is dropped, knives her fingers through her hair and paces toward the back window. He waxes poetic about himself, praises his ingenuity, his brilliance. “Knew all along you were nothing but a dirty bandit.” Whatever his astute foresight might have won him, it doesn’t see her slip quietly out of her shoes and roll her hose down her legs one by one. He doesn’t hear her pad on bare feet behind him, only jerks into action when nylon wraps taut around his throat, twisted and cruel and unforgiving.

He chokes and struggles, claws at his own neck when he should be fighting back at her. Rookie mistake. He takes a knee, blue in the face and red at the neck, floundering like a fish out of water. Fiona is methodical and silent, burdened with the awful task of saving her own life at the expense of another. _Just a hyperion lackey. No one’ll miss him._

There is no sound but that of a dying man struggling to breathe, the slap of his face against the tile, her knees bruising on the floor as she follows him down to finish the job. He twitches once and lays still. Her hands bleed from lacerations she feels only now, when her heart starts beating again.

She releases her aching grip, sits back on the dead man’s legs to take stock and consider her options. She wipes beaded sweat from her brow, brushes hair out of her eyes with a knuckle when she sees broad shoulders silhouetted against the fluorescent light of the corridor.

"Sorry, I’ll — I’ll clean this up in a sec."


	8. Symbolism

She always wakes up first, eyes slide open to near-blackness before they adjust to the luxurious suite, spacious and opulent as a palace. Too much space for a man living alone, no matter how prodigious his ego. Cavernous and cold — frigid in the negative temperature of space before the station’s heaters kick into overdrive. She practically shivers under several blankets, one of which stuffed with feathers plucked from some extraterrestrial bird in a neighboring solar system.

She must have been less subtle than she thought because she hears him shift beside her, watches as he rolls to the side of the bed and reaches for something on the floor. There’s a flash of muted yellow before something heavy and cotton lands on her face. "I can hear your teeth chattering from here."

She holds the garment in the dim light, recognizes the label and the shoddy patch-job, the scent of expensive cologne and the subtler smell of fabric softener. In the dark there is a dilemma. This may be the first sign of true kindness he’s shown — a glimpse at the humanity under the demagogue. Why would a guy hold onto this ratty thing for so long when he could buy private islands with pocket change? There has to be something sentimental here ; a threadbare connection between the man he was and the man he is.

Fiona shrugs it on over her bare chest where it sits loose enough for the crew neck to dip low and expose a delicate collarbone. Her arms get lost in the sleeves but it’s warm enough against the interstellar chill. She chews her lip ragged, watches him settle onto his back with cautious eyes. "Thanks."

"Don’t mention it, sweet cheeks," he says, voice husky and low and private. "You look good in yellow."

When she falls back into fitful sleep, she dreams of two yellow hands holding her underwater until her lungs fill up with gold.


	9. Wretched

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Five times kissed prompt.

**I.**

  
"What’s going on?"

He doesn’t answer her, just beckons her away from the doorway and over to the airlock viewing platform. When she’s at his side, he crosses his arms and leans onto his heels. "Pest control."

She frowns, brow crinkled in confusion until she looks through the window and into the loading bay. the face staring back doesn’t ring familiar until he affixes her with a pleading gaze, eyes wide and red-rimmed, nose smeared with equal parts blood and mucus from from his audible blubbering. Fredrick Courtney. Cubicle 323. Human resources department.

"Please, Livvy, don’t let him do this."

Jack slams the side of his fist against the glass and the dead man jumps out of his skin, whimpers in fear. "Now you’re begging for help? Thirty minutes ago you were selling her out."

Fona glances from Handsome Jack to Fredrick and back again, lips rounded in a puzzled ring. "What are you talking about?"

"That spineless sack of shit brought me a folder full’a proof that _Livvy_  isn’t who she says she is." When he rounds on her she can’t help the way her heart jumps into her throat, the familiar feeling of treading on thin ice setting her teeth on edge. "Which, _duh_ , I already knew. If I didn’t, maybe you and that asshole might be switching places right about now." He places a hand on his chest, all sincerity. "But we made a deal. I don’t screw over my team. I don’t sell out my people." 

Fiona knows enough about human nature to believe him; no one with all the cards stacked in their favor pretends to be genuine. For all of his (glaring, reprehensible) flaws, she can at least allow him this one admirable quality.

"But this isn’t about me. It’s about you," and with that he smiles, playing the benefactor; the hero, "so, the nice guy I am, I’m gonna let you choose. You wanna space this miserable coward or let him live out the rest of his sad, pathetic life?"

Fredrick must have heard because he’s crawling toward her on bloodied hands and torn-slacked knees. Fiona watches, unmoved. He knew this information would have been her death sentence. He hoarded her secrets in the hopes of a raise or reward or even a sliver of recognition. Fiona used to chat with him at the coffee machine. She told him her favorite movies and listened to him talk about his kids; laughed at his son’s yearbook pictures with him. Called his wife pretty. This is an unspeakable betrayal. Her stomach turns into serpentine knots.

Fiona’s face is a mask when she gives jack her answer.

"Space him."

Jack lets out a victorious bark of laughter as the rat weeps in its final moments, fingers clawing bloody tracks into the glass. Fiona is no stranger to death. Pandora has filed down any semblance of aversion she ever had. So when he’s sucked out into the black, body bent at an impossible angle to fit through the crack in the hull, she only watches.

There’s a moment of silence as Jack closes the the hatch. When the mechanical whirring stops and the pressure stabilizes, he favors her with a proud, feral grin. "Gotta say, Babydoll," he leans against the blood-streaked window, "didn’t think you had it in you."

Every nerve is dull, wrapped in plastic as she deliberately closes the gap between them, takes a fistful of his waistcoat and crushes her mouth against his. All at once, like waking up a sleeping limb, her skin comes alive — crackling back to life with electric sensory overload.

Breaking away from him is like ripping off a bandage — a split second of raw agony before a breath of cool, recycled oxygen.

"I hate traitors."

**II.**

The last time she saw pandora like this, a very different lover was in the driver’s seat. Well, not so different, considering the extenuating circumstances. The arid desert wind combs fingers through her hair as it buffets the windshield. Ashes flake away from the cigarette in her fingers (finest, organic hydroponic tobacco, the nicotine rips at her throat with every drag, turns smokey laughs into sandpaper music.)

The hand on her thigh keeps her from running off into a daydream, battles her guilt away from this one moment of sick happiness. She’s always arguing with herself when they’re together; one side fighting for her indulgence while the other seethes in disgust.

She brings her cigarette to her lips, sucks in the caramel heat before blowing smoke toward the sky. She flicks the butt behind them, forgotten in the dunes in their wake, shifts in the supple leather seat to crawl toward him. She buries her face in the cologne at his neck before leaving a cluster of red kisses against his thrumming pulse.

"Pull over."

**III.**

"Butt. Stallion."

"Inspired, right?"

"It’s…something."

"Moving right along." He ushers her toward the next exhibit, a splendid mural of the god-king of Pandora himself, resplendent and shooting at a tentacled monster emerging, slavering, from a vault. "This is where I killed the hideous Destroyer, who would later go on to power the awesome Eye of Helios."

"Yeah, I’m familiar with it." She takes a closer look, fist to chin like an art connoisseur. "You look dashing. Like a comic book hero."

He sweeps up behind her, whirls her by the hips to pull her flush against his chest like a swashbuckling paragon; masculine stance impeccable. Fiona laughs despite herself until he kisses her breathless, dips her so suddenly that she squeals against his mouth. She hums, pats his chest with both hands until he pulls away a conservative inch.

"Hey, Mr. Hero, if you drop me I’m gonna be pissed."

**IV.**

Angel destroyed him.

He comes to bed reeking of alcohol with bloodied knuckles, split and ragged and untended. His mask folds unnaturally where it looks like he’s tried to yank it off by the forehead.

Fiona takes her death as she has countless others. Quietly. Inwardly. Cracked and peeling on the inside but stainless without. She knows that’s not what he wants to see so she makes herself scarce, spends her nights back at her dormitory where she stares holes into her ceiling.

He stumbles to her door, waits for her to let him in before he crumples onto her bed, head in his hands. She notes his hands first, goes immediately for the standard first-aid kit in her pre-stocked medicine cabinet, returns with strips of gauze and antibacterial ointment. On Pandora, she might have just rubbed dirt in it. It’s no wonder she rarely ever caught colds up here.

Fiona sets to work, pulling his hands away from his face one at a time to administer relief. She gives him time to grieve in piece, one hand up his wrinkled button-down and against skin flush with drink. They sit like this in silence until he stirs. she takes one brutal hand in hers and brings the knuckles to her lips.

"You’re fucked up."

And whether she means drunk or ruined or wretched, she’s not entirely sure.

**V.**

"You gonna give me a kiss for good luck?"

Her nerves are frayed, eyes raw from rubbing away sleep. She smiles, bare-bones and infinitely, inexplicably sad. One way or another, her fate is sealed. Either Jack releases the Warrior and devours her home, or the vault hunters win the day — put him in the ground like they did Nisha and Angel.

He might be a hero and she might be a princess, but there is no happy ending here. Just righteous judgment for living in sin. You can never have your cake and eat it too. Sacrifices must be made; blood spilled in deference to fate. The wheel never stops turning.

She pushes away from the wall and into his orbit, straightens his waistcoat before biting her lip hard enough to draw blood. It tastes like copper and the trickster’s price. Blood drew them together and it’d drive them back apart. She feels his bloodstained hands on her face, thumbs running over her cheeks where tears should be, but aren’t. (She’ll cry later, on the downward spiral back to Pandora.)

"Good luck." It’s a raw whisper, as pitiful as she feels. She tips her face up to kiss the devil one last time, savors the taste of mint and aftershave and prosthetic skin, of contagious madness and greatness and horror and beauty. All of her hope and regret. The simmering open note and the crescendo. It’d been fun to fuck a god; like taking a hit of raw potential energy. Like black tar stardust. No one else will ever compare.

By the time his silhouette atomizes into nothing in front of the fast-travel outpost, she’s already heading towards departures. Helios is a metal prison without him in it. Maybe, on the off chance that he succeeds, she resolves to be on the right side of history this time, even if it means losing.

Her shuttle flies over the Hero’s Pass as a beam of otherworldly light splits the heavens above her home. She presses her fingers to the window, whispers so close that her words fog up the glass.

"I’ll see you soon."


	10. Rasa

Drunk or high or on the edge of sleep, those mismatched eyes are always alert. Like a bird of prey, sharp with a thousand-yard gaze right into the soul of things. The charisma and irreverent charm is just a veneer, something shiny to hide the serrated edge. No one holds a planet in his palm by sheer dumb luck. His enemies might have underestimated him; from what she hears most end up dead because of it.

She won’t be a story he tells his next secretary over a glass of scotch.

So she’s cautious, creeps around the edge of interest in heels that announce her long before she’s seen. She sends the Raiders less and less, citing stricter security measures considering her new position. They have no idea just how close she’s gotten; how deep she’s infiltrated Helios. She’s sure this is the textbook definition of _sleeping with the enemy_. One day she walks in on him strangling a man to death, someone she knew had been suspicious of her from the start. That’s when she knows she’s danced right over the edge and out into open air.

Her stomach flips when she drops into the inky black expanse below.

She’s too exhausted to sleep, cheek pressed against his bare chest, listening to a war drum heartbeat and hell-bellows breath. Measured and even, almost human at his most vulnerable. She can’t count how many nights she’s spent with him on two hands anymore. If she doesn’t kill him now she never will.

And maybe that’s just where she stands: somewhere between a sinner and a saint. Too sanctimonious to shoot him once but wretched enough to fall into his bed over and over again. Maybe it’s not up to her anymore. She’s just a grifter from a backwater planet. Whoever said she had to start killing kings?

If she moves quick and quiet she can sneak down to shipping, stow away on an eridium transport carrier and hitch a ride down to Lynchwood. One train ride later and she’d be home free, back in the shadow of Hollow Point where she belonged.

Before she leaves she props herself up on an elbow, takes a long look at the artificial face she’s seen every single day for months now. The stark contrast of two different skin tones, the rubbery edges, the metal clasps. Sharp lines and severe features, hints of plastic surgery that betray his age and manic desperation. Fiona’s never seen what lay underneath but her guesses have always hinged on the grotesque: the result of some work-related incident. Something even the most advanced surgeons in the galaxy couldn’t fix with a tuck-job; bad enough to invoke _tabula rasa_. As her gaze flicks from long lashes to squared jaw she thinks she understands him more now ( facing him head-on rather than through batted lashes or rose-colored glasses ) than she ever has. And that’s why the razor blade sewn into the sole of her shoe stays there, tempered by sympathy.

He’s just a man. Once in a while she could even say he’d been tender and careful, reverent and indulgent and protective.

And she’s just a woman who drank it all in and nearly drowned.

"Don’t wake up, you bastard." She slides a finger along his creased forehead, flicks a lock of thick brown hair out of his sinister face. She hovers a hair’s breadth over his lips, feels the prosthetic skin as she whispers against them. "Don’t you dare wake up."


End file.
